Estelle’s book is based on extensive fieldwork amongst the Kurdish speaking Yezidis in Armenia. She analyses more their sound practices, and focuses of a vocal repertoire used to express feelings of sorrow. Along with the written argument of her book, she wished to publish some 60 audio and video documents. These were discussed in the book, but her goal was also to provide a small commented collected of these relatively unknown practices, for other researchers to study.

So the interface is freely accessible to anyone (no login required). All documents are subtitled, and introduced by a commentary which describes their context for those who don’t have the book at hand (or don’t have it at all).

The content is obviously Estelle’s work. My job was to create the interface. Technical highlights:

I used only HTML5, CSS3 and a bit of javascript. Therefore the interface can run from a portable media as well (no php required).

All media files are served directly as HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements (no Flash involved).

The interface is entirely W3C valid.

Each document’s description and player is stored as a separate file on disk. Documents are loaded and unloaded on demand using javascript. This circumvents any memory outage problems which would have resulted from a simple "hidden" approach (like in creating 62 players and having 61 of them hidden at all times).

The slideshow in the background displays landscape pictures took by Estelle during her fieldwork. Their order is random, providing for a unique experience at each visit. It also rescales to always fit the entire screen.

CSS media queries ensure that the interface looks good at various screen sizes.